The cosmos, a popularizer of science concluded shortly
after 1900, is "simply a machine, so orderly and compact, so simple in
construction, that we may reckon its past and gauge something of its future
with almost as much certitude as that of a dynamo or a water‑wheel. In
its motions there is no uncertainty, no mystery." [6]
Such a conclusion seemed to be inescapably drawn from the then known facts of
physics and chemistry and quite consonant with the best informed and most prevalent
thought about them.

Since the days of Galileo and Newton, scientific knowledge
had been piling up and pointing ever more clearly to the material nature and
mechanical operation of the whole physical universe. Matter was conceived of,
in a common‑sense way, as something substantial and eternal, something
that could be accurately weighed and measured, something too which functioned
mechanically through an iron interplay of cause and effect. Toward confirming
this conception and stimulating the search for still more facts in support of
it, the mechanical industrialization of the nineteenth century contributed immensely.

By 1870 the steam engine had already given rise
to the physical science of thermodynamics with its epochal twin laws of the
conservation and the degradation of energy. By this date, moreover, the kinetic
theory of gases was formulated, the wave theory of heat and light established,
the atomic theory of the structure of matter capped by Mendeléyev's periodic
law, and a new means found in [108/109] spectrum analysis of identifying
matter in the heavens with matter on earth.

Along all these lines much confirmatory progress
was made during the next thirty years. By help of Mendeléyev's law, for example,
new chemical elements were discovered: gallium in 1871, scandium in 1879, germanium
in 1886. Helium, also, which by aid of the spectroscope Lockyer had detected
in the sun in 1868, was found in 1895 by Ramsay in the earth in the mineral
cleveite. Obviously the whole universe was constructed of the same material elements.

Furthermore, it was disclosed in the '80's by the
Dutch physicist van't Hoff that the osmotic pressure of chemical solutions conforms
with the principles of thermodynamics governing gas pressure, and by Arrhenius,
a Swede, that it is likewise connected with the electrical properties of solutions.
These disclosures were the cornerstone of a vast superstructure of physical
chemistry, in which thermodynamics and electrical science were combined in ever-extending
theoretical knowledge and practical industrial applications.

Probably the most novel scientific achievement of
the last third of the nineteenth century, theoretical as well as practical,
was in the domain of electrical phenomena, and certainly in generalizations
about natural science the dynamo supplanted the steam engine as the favorite
metaphor. In 1873 appeared Clerk Maxwell's great treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, a classic attempt to make the known facts of electricity
fit the then generally accepted pattern of mechanics. It maintained the theory
that electricity is matter moving in waves like those of light and radiant heat.

Toward the end of the century two new events of
far‑reaching importance occurred in electrical science. One was the promulgation
of the electron theory. As far back as 1756 Benjamin Franklin had spoken casually
of electrical "particles" and in the 1830's Faraday had based some
interesting experiments on an atomic theory of electricity, but the significance
of all this was long unperceived. Now, however, Joseph Thomson, working in his
celebrated research laboratory at Cambridge on the conduction of electricity
through gases, reached the certain conclusion that electricity is [109/110]
composed of particles (to which he gave the Newtonian name of "corpuscles")
and demonstrated that these were constituent parts of atoms. Simultaneously
Hendrik Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, pursuing a different line of research, arrived
at much the same conclusion, except that, while Thomson explained electricity
in terms of matter, Lorentz expressed matter in terms of electricity and named
the particles "electrons"a name which prevailed over Thomson's
"corpuscles." At any rate the converging investigations of these two
eminent physicists solved the problemold as the Greekswhether
different kinds of matter have a common basis. The answer at last was an unqualified
"yes."

The other event was the discovery of radio activity.
It began with a German physicist, Wilhelm Röntgen, who accidentally stumbled
upon X rays in 1895. The next year Henri Becquerel, professor at the Polytechnic
in Paris, found radio‑active properties in uranium, and at the turn of
the century Pierre Curie and his equally gifted Polish wife managed to extract
radium from pitchblende. Knowledge of X rays was immediately serviceable in
experiments which confirmed the electron theory and also, most practically,
in medicine and surgery.

The edifice of physical science as built up laboriously
and continuously throughout three centuries appeared at the end of the nineteenth
quite secure and well‑nigh complete. In the future little would remain
to be done, it was imagined, beyond measuring physical constants to the increased
accuracy represented by another decimal place, investigating a bit more the
mechanics of electrons, and resolving some recent doubts about the ether. The
electron theory of Lorentz and Thomson assumed that the electrical particles
moved within an atom in accordance with Newtonian dynamics and that the atom
was like a solar system in miniature, with electrons revolving within it as
planets swing around the sun. Further investigation, it was predicted, would
prove this assumptionthough the next generation of physicists learned
with shock that it didn't.

The doubts about ether were already bothersome.
Ether had been postulated as an intangible something filling all space, and
it was very convenient to nineteenth‑century physicists. It provided [110/111]
for a medium through which waves of heat, light, and electricity could undulate,
like sea waves through water. It also validated the Newtonian conception of
absolute motion, always and everywhere the same, for inasmuch as all stars were
moving in the ether their motion could be considered as absolute by reference
to it, just as a bird's motion can be referred to the air through which it flies.
Unfortunately for the certitudes of physical science, a delicate experiment
of two Americans, Michelson and Morley, in 1887 showed that motion through the
"ether," and indeed the ether itself, could not be detected empirically.
It thus discredited the whole ether hypothesis. Again and again the Michelson‑Morley
experiment was repeated in the hope that it might turn out differently. Only
the generation of scientists after 1900 could bring themselves to do without
"ether," and then Einstein would formulate his new doctrine of relativity.

VII. DETERMINISTIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE

To older and sustained interest in physics and chemistry,
the latter part of the nineteenth century added a new and surpassing interest
in biology. Just as physical science inspired confidence in its mechanistic
and materialistic assumptions by reason of its practical contributions to technology,
industry, and material wealth, so biological science, by its promise of promoting
human health and happiness and raising up a superior race, obtained a most respectful
hearing for its deterministic theories. In a period when, incredible as it may
appear, health was even more eagerly sought after than wealth, the novelties
of biology naturally attracted more attention than the somewhat staid and prosaic
course of physics.

Biological investigation during the period followed
two main lines which rarely converged. One was biochemical, physiological and
microscopic, leading to a big access of precise knowledge about embryology,
cellular structure of living organisms, pathology, and bacteriology. This was
the province of such biologists as Pasteur, Virchow, and Koch, whose revolutionary
achievements in medical science, particularly in the detection and prevention
of germ diseases, have already been sketched.

This line of research carried into problems of heredity.
In 1839 [111/112] Theodore Schwann had formulated a "cellular"
theory, that all living things originate and grow in very small structural units,
or "cells"; and shortly afterwards other physiologists had recognized
the existence within these cells of vital material to which was assigned the
suggestive name of "protoplasm." Then in the 1870's August Weismann,
professor at Freiburg, distinguished between ordinary bodily (or somatic) cells,
which die with the individual, and reproductive (or germ) cells, which transmit
a continuous stream of protoplasm from generation to generation and are potentially
immortal. Weismann reasoned further in the '80's that inasmuch as hereditary
characters can be transmitted only through germ cells, all acquired characters,
which are variations occurring in somatic cells, cannot be inherited.

At the same time it was well known, at least to
practical gardeners and farmers, that new varieties of plants and animals could
originate in "sports" and be maintained by cross‑fertilization
and selection, and the article on "Horticulture" in the ninth edition
of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1881) noted the fact: "An inferior
variety of pear may suddenly produce a short bearing fruit of superior quality;
a beech tree, without obvious cause, a shoot with finely divided foliage; or
a camellia an unwontedly fine flower. When removed from the plant and treated
as cuttings or grafts, such sports may be perpetuated. Many garden varieties
of flowers and fruits have thus originated."

But none then knew outside a corner of Moravia that
an Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, had discovered the hereditary principle
by means of which "sports" could be bred scientifically. Already in
the '60's Mendel had conducted in the garden of his cloister a series of ingenious
experiments with the crossbreeding of peas and had reached the conclusion that
in the germ cells are determinants of particular characters, which, when transmitted,
become "dominant" or "recessive" according to fixed mathematical
laws. But this pregnant conclusion, which confirmed and refined the deterministic
cellular theory of Weismann and likewise explained the phenomena of variation
and mutation, was buried away for thirty years in dust-gathering tomes of a
local scientific society. Not until its resurrection by De Vries and Bateson
at the beginning of the twentieth [112/113] century did Mendelianism
come into its own and make of heredity an exact experimental and industrial
science.

In the meantime most biologists pursued another and quite
different line of investigation, the one opened up by Darwin and leading to
emphasis on environment. As we remarked in the first chapter, the distinctively
Darwinian doctrine of natural selection attained a great vogue in the early
'70's, partly because of its simplicity and seeming applicability to a wide
range of human interests, and partly because of its concurrence with a high
tide of industrial and military competition. The vogue remained throughout the
era and gave continuing direction to a vast deal of inquiry, not only in biology
but in psychology and the so‑called social sciences. And the further the
inquiry was carried, the more the results verified, or seemed to verify, the
Darwinian thesis. Biologists themselves, with the help of anatomists and geologists,
accumulated such a mass of confirmatory evidence as to leave no doubt in the
mind of any well‑informed person that all life was essentially one and
that it had been differentiated into multitudinous species of plants, insects,
reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals by a perfectly natural evolutionary process.

Darwin himself did not regard natural selection
as a complete explanation of the evolutionary process. He had buttressed it
with Lamarck's hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characters, and had
still recognized its basic shortcoming. It explained why variations survived
or failed to survive, but not how the variations actually occurred. Nevertheless
his own early interest in a study of heredity which might meet this difficulty
and his sympathetic attitude toward the first endeavors of Weismann were largely
abandoned by his disciples. These (and Darwin too in his last years) engaged
in most unedifying controversy with Weismann over the inheritance of acquired
characters, and in total ignorance of Mendel and his work they went gaily on
their way, brushing aside the specialists in heredity as though they were mosquitoes,
and blithely assuming that natural selection was the proved and adequate cause
of evolution and the origin of species.

Before long, of course, almost all biologists came
to agree with Weismann in rejecting the inheritance of acquired characters,
but [113/114] not so a large number of evolutionary philosophers and
sociologists. Herbert Spencer to the end of his days carried on bitter controversy
with Weismann, and many others clung stubbornly to what they regarded as the
chief prop of Darwinism and the surest pledge of human progress. And the Darwinian
school that accepted the Weismann amendment only concentrated the harder on
natural selection. By natural selection alone Haeckel in 1898 evolved the whole
human race in twenty‑six stages from chunks of carbon through simple structureless
bits of protoplasm and on through the chimpanzee and the pithecanthropus
erectus. [7] The physicist Helmholtz,
under the spell of Darwinism, suggested that all life on earth might have evolved
from a few germs brought hither from distant worlds in the interstices of meteoric
stones. And Darwinian social scientists imagined even greater marvels.

An essential feature of Darwinism was its idea that
external circumstances rigidly determine the nature of living creatures, including
man himself; that environment is more significant than heredity; that neither
human reason nor human will can act independently of its fateful past conditioning.
Natural selection was a blind and brute process, operating under inexorable
laws of its own and assuring existence and development only to such forms of
life as were adapted to their physical milieu and enabled to survive the fierce
and constant struggle waged against them from outside. Francis Galton, it is
true, based his special science of eugenics on the supposition that intelligence
or the lack of it is an hereditary quality, but his notion of heredity was more
in keeping with the reasoning of his cousin Darwin than with the discoveries
of Weismann and Mendel.

The vogue of Darwinism synchronized, we must recall,
with the ascendancy of mechanical and material conceptions in physics and chemistry,
and the one colored the other. To evolving life were applied the principles
of the conservation of matter and energy, and this fed the belief that all the
various activities of living organisms would presently be disclosed as mere
modes of atomic motion and manifestations of mechanical or chemical energy.
Already some progress toward this end was being made in physiology. Physical
activities of the body were traced to the chemical and thermal energy of the
food taken into it. Phenomena of nervous action were found to be accompanied
by electrical changes. The variety of idiocy known as cretinism was proved to
be due to the failure of the thyroid gland.

Here and there a scientist or philosopher raised
his voice in criticism of the prevalent trend, declaring that even if the problems
of life were reduced to those of physics and chemistry the concepts of matter
and force were but abstractions without ultimate explanation. Ultimates, it
was said, could not be arrived at by methods of experimental science, whether
physical or biological. [8] But voices of
dissent were pretty effectually drowned in the wave of materialistic and deterministic
certitude induced by the coalescence of Darwinian biology with physics, and
the high‑water mark was reached in 1899 with Haeckel's dogmatic book of
revelations, [9] according to which life
is but a form of matter and the highest faculties of the human mind but properties
of brain cells evolved automatically from unicellular protozoa and thence spontaneously
from inorganic compounds. Though direct evidence for this conclusion was unluckily
lacking, it was widely accepted on faith, proving that even with scientists,
or at any rate pseudo‑scientists, faith may transcend knowledge. And as
a hopeful addendum to Haeckel's faith, a publicist could prophesy that "in
forty or fifty years" laboratory technicians might be manufacturing from
inorganic materials "endless varieties [of life] as readily as they do
new chemical varieties of sugar now." [10]

VIII. PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

The rise of "scientific" psychology with
its laboratory methods was a conspicuous feature of the era of materialism,
a whirling eddy [115/116] in the merging streams of biology and physics.
Its spirit, if one may so denote a very material thing, had been neatly prefigured
by a German physician before 1871: "Just as a steam engine produces motion,
so the intricate organic complex of force‑bearing substances in an animal
organism produces a total sum of certain effects which, when bound together
in a unity, are called by us mind, soul, thought." [11]
But its true foster father was another German physician, Wilhelm Wundt.

While professor at Heidelberg in 1863 Wundt had
published some famous preliminary studies on the "human and animal soul."
Then in 1874 appeared his Foundations of Physiological Psychology, the
first monumental exposition of the physical bases of thought and behavior and
of the affinity of human minds to those of the lower animals. Called the next
year to the University of Leipzig, Wundt opened there his celebrated psychological
laboratory, in which knowledge of human behavior was deduced from experiments
on cats and dogs, rabbits and mice, and in which, too, a generation of younger
men from all over Europe (and America) were inspired and equipped, when they
returned home, to start similar laboratories and to conduct similar experiments.

Laboratory investigation of man's "animal mind"
and of consciousness as a phase of physical activity yielded a considerable
offspring, and the leading accoucheurs, appropriately enough, were medical men.
Thus, an Italian physician, Cesare Lombroso, professor at Turin, won fame by
his delivery of the "psychology of criminology." Criminals, it seemed,
were born, not made. They were a special type of human animal whom evolutionary
processes of degeneration and atavism had endowed with peculiar physical features
[12] and necessarily therefore with peculiar
behavior; they were not morally responsible for their acts. Subsequently, from
quite a different slant, Sigmund Freud was to tackle the whole problem of psychological
abnormality, and his fame would outstrip Lombroso's.

Meanwhile, in the early '90's, another physician,
the Russian [116/117] Ivan Pavlov, following more closely in Wundt's
footsteps, began a notable career by making detailed observation of animals
and humans in terms of external physical stimuli and reactions and embodying
the results in a system of "conditional reflexes." This, later described
as behaviorism, fortified the notion that man's mind, no less than his body,
consisted of matter and was governed machine‑like by physical laws.

Also in the early '90's a French student of natural
science and medicine, Alfred Binet, undertook in his psychological laboratory
at the Sorbonne to construct simple tests for the gauging of intelligence and
to correlate the mental differences thus disclosed with physical differences
of head measurement and skin sensitivity. Although the search for such a correlation
proved remarkably elusive and was eventually abandoned, Binet's work on intelligence
tests prepared the ground, after the turn of the century, for a luxuriant crop
of educational psychologists, including, as tares among the wheat, no small
number of charlatans.

Still another and more "philosophical"
product of the age was pragmatism. Its chief spokesman was an American trained
in medicine in Germany, William James, who passed in 1875 from the chair of
physiology at Harvard to that of psychology. James rebelled against the mechanical
and fatalistic presuppositions of his contemporaries and yet distrusted reason
and felt scant sympathy for earlier "idealism" or any system of absolutes.
He viewed the world we live in as a world of change and chance, variety and
variation, chaos and novelty. Every human trait, he held, operates as an instrument
in the individual's struggle to live, and each is validated or invalidated by
its effects upon the struggle. Such a pragmatic attitude fitted nicely into
the mood of the age. It enabled one to scoff politely at logic and orthodox
philosophy, and at the same time to entertain the hope that through trial and
error and adaptation an irrational and purely material world could continue
to progress. There was, of course, no absolute morality; but what "worked"
was good and what didn't was bad. The proof of the pudding was in the
eating. To a generation which began with Prussia's defeat of France and ended
with Britain's triumph over the Boers and witnessed [117/118] in the
interval a steady advance of science and technology, the gospel of pragmatism
was peculiarly attractive.

IX. POSITIVISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Positivism was likewise attractive. Auguste Comte
had died more than a decade before 1870, but his works lived after him. There
were so many things in his positivist philosophy to appeal to the ensuing generation.
It was like James's pragmatism in that it enshrined evolutionary conceptions,
eschewed all ultimate explanations, whether "theological" or "metaphysical,"
and concentrated upon scientific fact‑finding. Furthermore it exalted
social science, that is, sociology, as queen of the sciences, just when industrialism
was begetting mass movements and new social problems, and it ascribed to social
science the same exact methods and the same fruitful principles as those characterizing
physical science; in fact sociology was "social physics." Besides,
Comte had imbued his scientific precepts with a rosy coloring of optimism and
a faint aroma of benevolence which titillated a generation still distant from
the World War. Humanity was to him and to his immediate disciples a mystical
as well as a positivist phenomenon, not alone the subject of meticulous research
but the object of religious worship, a substitute, as it were, for the Christian
God. The highest service which could be rendered to humanity was the "good
works" of collecting all possible facts about it and letting them speak
for themselves, and this service its high priests, the research professors,
would perform to the ever greater glory and progress of mankind.

Probably the number of persons who conned Comte's
Positive Philosophy between 1870 and 1900 and fully absorbed it
was but a fraction of the host of social scientists who emerged in those years.
But consciously or unconsciously almost all of thesesociologists, economists,
statisticians, political scientists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologistswere
conditioned by the climate of positivism and adapted, as by a process of natural
selection, to the pursuit of its method and its goal.

Sociological studies, multiplying after 1871, were
of two main kinds. One was the synthesizing of data of history, economics, and
politics with data of natural science and physiological psychology [118/119]
into generalized statements of the "laws" and "trends" presumably
governing the behavior and evolution of human society. This was represented
most elaborately by the three volumes of Spencer's Principles of Sociology
(1877‑1896), in which the opinionated author treated of society as an
evolving organism, of religion as stemming from the worship of ancestral ghosts,
and of the struggle for existence as evidenced by a constant natural antagonism
between nutrition and reproduction and between the productiveness of industry
and the waste of militarism. The other kind was the analysis, through detailed
"field" investigation, of the existing status of particular social
classes or groups. This was the aim of Le Play's notable studies, over a score
of years, of family life in France and elsewhere throughout Europe, and likewise
of numerous social surveys of urban centers, especially of their poorer population.
The most monumental of these was the inquest into the "life and labor of
the people in London," directed and financed by Charles Booth, a British
capitalist and philanthropist, and reported in extenso, with maps and
charts, by his staff of "experts," first in three volumes (1889‑1891)
and later in eighteen (1903).

Sociological viewpoints and methods were increasingly
adopted by specialists in allied fields. Historians, for example, concerned
themselves less with individual biography and political narrative, and more
with social movements, with the evolution of social forces and social institutions.
Political scientists, too, were moved to stress the practical rather than the
theoretical aspects of government and to deal not so much with its structure
as with its historic functioning in and on society at large. Economists also
turned from a priori reasoning and the abstractions of the earlier classical
school, either, as in Germany, to concrete study of the setting of economic
problems in history and national society, or, as in Austria and England, to
an appraisement of economic phenomena in terms of mathematical and physical
science. Thus, while Gustav Schmoller and Adolf Wagner preached a kind of national
socialism from their academic chairs at Berlin, Jevons, the leading English
economist, demonstrated at least to his own satisfaction a correlation between
commercial crises and sun spots.

A special importance attached after 1870, to statisticians,
in part [119/120] because of their indispensability to expanding
business corporations and improving governmental censuses, in part because of
their helpfulness to sociologists, mathematical economists, and social historians,
and in part, also, because of the scientific airs they assumed. They claimed
that the statistical method was the "exact" method of social science;
nay more, that their method was science itself. As the foremost of them, Georg
von Mayr, said: "Statistical science is the systematical statement and
explanation of actual events, and of the laws of man's social life that may
be deduced from these, on the basis of the quantitative observation of mathematical
aggregates."

In emulation of physical and biological science
and under the influence of positivism, vast masses of factual data were collected
and published about man's present and past occupations and activities, about
his social life, about his economic life, about his political life, about his
cultural life. Never before had there been such an outpouring of doctoral dissertations,
such a profusion of "scientific" monographs, such a proliferation
of co‑operative research and publication. Nor had there ever been such
implicit faith in the social scientist's ability, by a mere marshaling of reported
facts and figures, to discover the true inwardness as well as the whole outwardness
of man and of human society.

The most original and reassuring contributions came
from anthropologists and archaeologists about man's extraordinarily long history
and his gradual ascent from savagery to civilization. A few specimens of what
Boucher de Perthes called "ante‑diluvian men" had been unearthed
just prior to 1870. Afterwards many more were dug up, together with sufficient
geological and archaeological evidence to indicate that they must have lived
at a time long antedating Noah and his flood‑riding ark. As excavating
went feverishly on, the duration of man's "prehistoric" past rapidly
lengthened. In the '80's it certainly reached to a "neolithic age,"
perhaps to a "palaeolithic age," anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 years
back. In the '90's the discovery of a few strange bones in faraway Java and
the reconstruction from them of the singular pithecanthropus erectus pointed
to the existence of evolving man half a million years ago and spurred on the
search for still earlier creatures, half‑human and [120/121 half‑apish,
that must have climbed out of ancestral trees and laboriously learned to make
fist hatchets. Simultaneously archaeologists were re-examining the ancient classical
foundations of European civilization. Schliemann, that German‑American
adventurer in high finance and deep digging, settled in Greece in 1868, and
during the next score of years uncovered and identified the site of legendary
Troy and unearthed at Mycenae and Tiryns ample proof of a civilization far antedating
that of the historic Greeks. By the end of the century, thanks to the efforts
of Schliemann and of many other and abler (if less self-advertised) archaeologists,
it was possible to trace the history of the Aegean lands, Egypt, and Mesopotamia
back several thousand years B.C.

Anthropologists, too, were exceedingly busy. Some,
the "physical" group, were indefatigable in measuring skull shapes
and other anatomical features of the quick and the dead and utilizing the results
to classify the "races" of mankind. True, there were almost as many
classifications as there were classifiers. But any such confusion failed to
arrest the growing faith that there must be different races in different stages
of evolution. By many physical anthropologists, notably by Francis Galton,
the conclusion was drawn that an existing race could pull itself up to a higher
plane, could transform its men into supermen, through obedience to "laws"
of eugenics requiring the physically fit to breed and the physically unfit to
practice birth control or be sterilized. In this respect, unfortunately, Galton's
“fit” got mixed up about the dictates of "science"; it was they who
proceeded to practice birth control.

Other anthropologists, the "cultural"
sort, zealously gathered an immense miscellany of data about the speech, customs,
crafts, and myths of primitive tribesmen all over the world, collated it with
similar data concerning European peoples, and facilely hypothesized the evolutionary
stages of man's cultural rise. Tylor published his standard textbook in 1871,
and Frazer brought out the Golden Bough in 1890.

Comte had counseled social scientists to stick to
"facts" and to refrain from metaphysical explanations. Though the
generation after 1870, detested the word "metaphysical" with a horror
and [121/122] vehemence worthy of the master, they were too much under
the spell of contemporary physics and biology, too much impressed by obvious
progress in machine industry, and withal too human, not to perceive in the myriad
facts they amassed a co‑ordinating principle of mechanical evolution which
was really metaphysical. Actually it was social scientists, more than natural
scientists, who implanted this principle in the popular consciousness; and it
was the postulates of social scientists, more than their facts, which inspired
the most distinctive (and most varied) intellectual movements of the era: agnosticism
in religion and realism in art, Marxism and integral nationalism, racialism
and pacifism, enlightenment for the masses and quest of the superman.